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French foreign policy: so far, François, So good

Given France’s importance as a world power, a member of the UN Security Council, one of the world’s largest economies, a nuclear power, and a driver of the EU project, French foreign policy under President Hollande is of fundamental importance to all of us.

Ironically no one mentioned foreign policy in six months of presidential campaigning. And Hollande is without a nano-second of government practice, let along international experience. Unnervingly, therefore, the answer to the question "Whither France in the world?" is quite simply "We don’t know, because no one has told us".

Hollande arrived at the Elysee Palace this month without much of a foreign policy narrative at all. And yet he was immediately confronted with numerous top-level international meetings of unprecedented intensity. On the day of his inauguration Hollande flew to Berlin to discuss the contentious issues of the Fiscal Treaty with its arch-backer Angela Merkel. After that it was to the United States for his first meeting with President Obama. Hollande had uncomfortable news – France would be pulling its troops out of Afghanistan. Then it was on to summits with the G8, NATO, G20 ones, and last but by no means least, the EU.

Even an experienced diplomat like Kissinger would have found this taxing. Hollande was faced with challenges of breathtaking complexity for a man whose recent overseas experience amounted to little more than put-putting around Greek islands on his motor scooter. However, just two weeks in and he has been doing rather well. We may be facing an unusual phenomenon in French politics: some politicians, through a difficult to analyse combination of virtù and fortuna, are lucky.

When, at the start of his presidential campaign, Hollande said he wanted to renegotiate the Eurozone Fiscal Treaty people laughed. It sounded as if Hollande was just making it up, and that he would pay the price with stock market chaos and Merkel’s ire. But fortuna has been good to him. It soon became clear that he was not alone in wanting more emphasis on growth and less on austerity. Italy piped up, as did Greece, and when Hollande met Obama , even he told him the US wanted stimulus growth in Europe. Even Germany may be changing its tune. With the German CDU getting a drubbing in the May North-Rhine Westphalia elections, and Merkel facing further elections in 2013, its vice-like grip on austerity no longer seems both politically as well as economically unquestionable. Hollande increasingly looks not just competent in capitals across Europe and North America, but also a man possessed with forethought.

Likewise, to tell the leader of the free world that to distinguish himself from his main rival in the election campaign he had to promise French troops would be withdrawn early from Afghanistan is not an easy thing to raise during your first meeting. But once again, luckily for Hollande "Home for Christmas" is logistically near impossible. 3,500 troops, 900 vehicles and 1400 containers cannot be removed from Afghanistan before December. Hollande will withdraw the troops, but in a way that will not trigger the fury of the Americans, while dismaying his domestic audience.

So far, François, so good. It won’t always be like this though. Cuts in spending – in defence especially – are looming, as are a mountain of other problems. And they are truly Himalayan: the ongoing Arab Spring, Syria, Iran, Sub-Saharan Africa. But many of these states are happy with a Hollande presidency. In his desperate attempts to beat off the challenge from the far right, Sarkozy’s campaign angered many of these African States, with its undertones of colonialism and even – intended or not – racism. And France’s former colonies really are ready for a new kind of relationship with the Motherland, who has sometimes been anything but maternal.

But it is not just new relationships with foreign powers that Hollande must forge. He needs quickly to develop a new foreign policy rhetoric and narrative that will define his presidency. Since de Gaulle, a certain logic has driven French foreign policy and the French Socialist Party’s overall foreign policy has not been markedly dissimilar from the mainstream right’s. That is a real shame, for new ideas and approaches from the intelligent, sophisticated, and politically thoughtful French would be so welcome in the world today, given the challenges the world faces.

For today at least, Hollande is one of the luckiest politicians in the history of the Fifth Republic. It remains to be seen: he may turn out to be one of the most skilful, and in foreign policy at least, the most radical.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.